Life, Unbounded

The Juno Mission to Jupiter: What the Probe Will Look For

Another quick refurbishment from the archives, this one about the Juno mission to Jupiter. With any luck in a few hours Juno will launch and be on its way, arriving at Jupiter in 2016.

Favorite nuclear flavors

Light or heavy? The nuclear choice On the heels of #SciAmChem day I thought I'd pull a post from the Life, Unbounded archives that could use a little airing and has a chemical slant.

The molecules that made the universe

Imagine a molecule... "We are starstuff", it's a well-used phrase in popular astronomy (yes, we are. The nuclei of most heavy atoms in your body were forged long before our solar system existed, a million kilometers down inside the cores of long-since-gone massive stars).

The Molecules That Made the Universe

“We are starstuff”, it’s a well-used phrase in popular astronomy (yes, we are. The nuclei of most heavy atoms in your body were forged long before our solar system existed, a million kilometers down inside the cores of long-since-gone massive stars).

When Worlds...Perturb

Bad Aliens, Meme Armor, and Intelligence in the Universe

These are two posts from the Life, Unbounded archives. They were written in April and May 2010. Around that time there was a lot of media noise about aliens - brought on in part by Stephen Hawking's comments about fearsome "nomadic" lifeforms that might roam the universe.

O NASA! My NASA!

Shuttle mission STS-118 (NASA) This is not exactly the normal kind of post on Life, Unbounded , but there's good reason for it.Our species of peculiarly upright, lurching, yabbering, fidgeting, opposing thumb creatures has managed to claw its way through time to arrive at a very special point.

Smoke signals

Storm on Saturn (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI) Oh weather; a joy, a pain, the making of a beautiful day or a miserable evening. Our planetary environment is constantly shuffling through a deck of thermodynamic cards and local conditions reflect a small part of the resultant lofting, pouring, steaming, streaming and meandering of atmospheric contents.

Smells Like the Beach

If there is anything that is predictable about planetary science it is the unpredictability. One of the best examples of this trait has been the remarkable story of Saturn’s moon Enceladus.

Welcome to Life, Unbounded: The Science of Origins

On December 24th, 1968 the crew of Apollo 8 became the first humans to bear direct witness to our planet, the Earth, rising above the horizon of another world.